“Won’t you take me back to school. I need to learn the golden rule. Won’t you lay it on the line. I need to hear it just one more time.”
The opening lyrics of the song “The Voice” by The Moody Blues written by Justin Hayward. The rocks are from Walden Pond.
A few days ago, as I was walking on my Southern Indiana country roads (three miles and one car to be seen), I decided to look for a podcast to listen to as I walked along. This is not the norm. The normal is classic rock turned up to 11. My ears are telling me more and more to back off. I never do.
But on this day, I tuned into to a podcast hosted by some guys I had never heard of from Waco, Texas. While I listened to them and their guest, I was taken to school. Smacked in the face with my recent writing that has been so Indiana one-sided heavy. And why not? I mean. Y’all saw what happened last year. Then the guest started talking about calling high school football games on radio as a teenager. He spoke of the objectivity that was needed for the task. Suddenly I was recalling my own time calling high school football games on radio. If the other team made a great play, my partner Gus Stephenson, and I gave that team and that player all the love we could. Great play is great play, no matter the jersey color. In fact, my objectivity was once problematic.
We were in Salem, Indiana that night calling the game between the North Harrison Cougars (our regular broadcast team) and homestanding Salem Lions. The week before, the head coach’s mom in Bedford (96.9 WKLO is a blowtorch with a huge signal) thought I said her son’s team was not ready for the game. Now, I probably said, “The defense was not ready for that play.” And they probably weren’t. The head coach was a good boy. He listened to mom like he should. Mom had it wrong. But that didn’t stop the coach from using this as cannon fodder before the Salem game that night. He told the team an old Cougar, whose dad was once the head coach at North, was bad mouthing them. He told them to go out and give Salem hell and reportedly threw a radio down and smashed it up for theatre and said a few other choice words.
At halftime, with the team down three scores, an old teammate of mine who was coaching for North from the top of the press box, told me what happened in the pregame and asked me about what I had said the previous week. I told him to look at the scoreboard and think about shoring up the defensive left instead of asking me about anything I had to say. After the game, North Harrison’s athletic director sought me. I asked him to name me one person ‘from’ North Harrison with a complaint about how I had taken care of business on the air for a number of years. He shook his head, silently. This guy played for my dad too before I did. He knew better.
Thinking about these halcyon days reminded me of what I have been writing lately. And I can do better. I don’t want to sound like a broken Cream and Crimson record. On top of that, this fall I am teaching North Harrison High School’s first “Principles of Broadcasting” class. Objectivity certainly need apply here too.
I need not let the recent success of Indiana Football cloud my previous football life. Like when I turned on Indiana when they fired Coach Bill Mallory. Like when I turned on Indiana when they fired Coach Bill Lynch and hired Kevin Wilson. That was extreme. That football season my dear wife, Carrie, and I had season tickets for the Marshall Thundering Herd and have been back to Huntington more than twenty times since to root on the Herd.
I need not sound like a Hoosier Football novice. We have plenty of those. I need to remember I have seen the Ole Miss Rebels play in more stadiums, nine, that I have the Indiana Hoosiers, seven. And along the way have seen 80 of the current FBS teams play in person.
Taking my dad to see USC play UCLA in The Rose Bowl was something he never thought he would ever see.
Passing the football around with my wife on a Thursday before USC-UCLA in The Rose Bowl was incredible too.
And yes, seeing the Hoosiers play in The Rose Bowl was nice too. Very nice.
But so was talking football with Coach Lee Hedges – a Louisiana legend- for a glorious hour and a half in 1986 in the coach’s office at Captain Shreve off Kings Highway in Shreveport. His former player at Louisiana Tech, Alden Reeves, was the head coach there at the time and these guys were kind to me, as I was swinging my leg daily that summer inside the stadium that is now named after Coach Hedges.
You wouldn’t know it now. There was once a bean field on the other side of the fence beyond the track at this stadium in 1986. In that beanfield, I had a Rawlings R-5 go there to die. Proud to have kicked it over the fence, I looked and looked for that ball. Never found it. I looked at my ball bag and thought… and then there were five.
I have been blessed to see games in Knoxville, Tuscaloosa, South Bend, Oxford, of course, and twenty other cities and towns across the map.
I can attest that visiting The Cradle of Coaches at Miami, Oh is pretty cool thing.
Talk about College Football History.
I could go on and on about people and places and memories that no one man deserves to have bestowed upon him. And when it comes to my writing life moving forward, I want to have the determination of my eight-year-old self behind me. That kid wearing the Condredge Holloway jersey with the Cincinnati Bengals helmet and the Raiders socks and pants that came from an even further by-gone era who had no idea what was ahead of him. He meant business.
I would be remiss if I did not thank David Smoak, Craig Smoak, and Tim Brando. They are the ones who took me to school and I appreciate it.
